Chapter 30
ROGUE
Her door's open and she's on the floor again, papers fanned out around her in that system only she can understand, pen behind her ear, another in her hand. She doesn't look up.
"If you're here to mess up my piles again," she says, "the answer is, see ya later. I'm in the middle of—"
"Vi."
Something in how I say her name does it.
She stops. Sets the pen down on the paper in front of her, slow, the way she does right before she squares up for a fight.
Then she looks at me, really looks, and whatever she finds on my face dismisses the next smart-ass way she was going to tell me to hit the road.
"What," she says. Not a question. Just flat and bracing.
I should have rehearsed this. I had a whole walk down the corridor to figure out how to say it and I've got nothing, because there's no good way, there's just the way, so I cross the room and crouch down in front of her so we're level.
I put the envelope in her hands. "The spy delivered. Just now."
She scrunches her brow. “What are you talking about?” she asks impatiently.
"Vi. I can't tell you it's him. I looked, and I can't. I don't know him the way you know him.
But somebody wanted us to have this, and they wanted you specifically to be the one to see it.
" I keep my voice low and even, the way you talk to someone standing on a ledge, because that's pretty much what this is.
"Whatever's in there, only you can say. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."
“What? How?” She clicks her tongue as if I’m messing with her, which she has every right to. The woman’s been looking for her dad for so long, now it feels like every lead is just a tease.
Regardless, her hands close around the envelope.
They're steady because she won't let them be anything else.
That's pure Vi, but the rest of her has gone somewhere far away.
She looks down at it. At the blank front, the unsealed flap.
At the thing she stopped letting herself hope for so long ago that hoping again might just kill her.
She opens it, slides the photograph out, and looks at it. For one long second, nothing happens at all.
Then it does.
I watch it cross her face, the disbelief first, then the thing underneath the disbelief, the thing she's been holding down with both hands since the word is fell out of Fischer's mouth and broke her open in that room.
Her lips part. The color goes out of her cheeks and then floods back all at once.
Her eyes fill but don't spill, like even now, even here, some stubborn piece of her refuses to let go in front of me.
She presses one hand flat against her mouth.
And she keeps looking at the photo like if she blinks, the man in the chair might decide to disappear.